Monty Graham has spent most of his life guided by two passions: the ocean and time. As a child in Danville, Kentucky—over 400 miles from the nearest coast—he remembers going out with his mother to search for crinoids and other marine fossils, from Kentucky’s deep past as a former ocean. He devoted his career to studying jellyfish, one of the oldest groups of animals on Earth.
But for Graham, the future holds just as strong a pull as the past. He studied jellyfish blooms in part because they’re harbingers of larger changes in the ocean. And in 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill wreaked havoc on communities on land and at sea, he led multi-organizational efforts to understand its larger ripples on marine life.
All those experiences shaped his mind for the role he took on this June: the new director of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC).
“During and after the oil spill in the Gulf, we relied heavily on the rich historical data to guide us on impacts, recovery and restoration,” Graham said. “I am an advocate for long-term datasets like those at the center of much of SERC’s science activities.”
SERC is doing, in Graham’s words, “the kind of science only the Smithsonian can do.” It has long-term datasets stretching decades into the past, as well as projects that fast forward to the future.
In the coming months, Graham aims to bring SERC science to the larger world—by showing how its vast stores of knowledge are transforming people’s lives across ecosystems, across industries and across time.